бум is Russian for ‘Boom’

Some of you may have read that a Proton – M rocket carrying Russia’s most advanced satellite crashed on Friday, nine minutes into the mission.

This has been one of several setbacks that have occurred recently in our space program. Now, taking the long view, unlike our American colleagues, we actually have a space program. And we have a lot of launches so a few oopsies are par for the course. Time will tell as we’ve ten launches planned for the next three months.

Last July’s failure occurred nearly instantly. I’ve got the report on my desk and am looking at it right now. One of the ignition stages went kablooie.  This latest failure was in the third stage.

Theoretically, that’s actually worse, because it’s showing problems across the board with different engines in different stages, which would be because of totally unrelated issues. One might think that there are either fundamental engineering issues or or even more likely, serious quality control issues permeating the program.

Or at least, you might think that. A simpler and much more logical explanation is Ukrainians.*

Special high resolution cameras were used film the launch today and my boys will be looking over the footage to see if any Cossacks were sabotaging today’s rocket.

 

PS: And maybe Lithuanian mob. Why? It may be that my rocket hit one of their cigarette-smuggling drones.